App Annie makes its third acquisition, but no IPO in 2016, says CEO

App data and insights platform App Annie continues a shopping spree with the acquisition of AppScotch, an app marketing data company. Terms of the deal aren’t being announced, but the roughly 10 employees of AppScotch — which launched two years ago and raised roughly $1 million in seed funding from Eastern European angel investors — have already joined App Annie at its downtown San Francisco headquarters.

The deal marks the third small startup that App Annie has brought into the fold. In 2014, it acquired a bootstrapped competitor, Distimo, for undisclosed terms. Last year, the company paid an undisclosed amount to buy the mobile measurement service Mobidia, which had raised just more than $16 million from investors.

On a call last week, cofounder and CEO Bertrand Schmitt said AppScotch’s technology will be integrated into new products that enhance App Annie’s paid-for intelligence offerings. “With this, we’ll be able to provide new metrics and more visibility into the advertising side, helping app developers better understand the efficiency of different marketing channels.”

In January, App Annie, which is often a first stop for developers, investors, and journalists looking to better understand app rankings and trends, raised $63 million in Series E funding in “mostly equity” and debt, Schmitt told us at the time.

The round was led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from earlier backers e.Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital. The debt was provided to the company by Silicon Valley Bank.

Last week, Schmitt said that in addition to buying AppScotch, the company is always taking an “active look at what’s happening,”including because “a lot of companies reach out to us on a regular basis to have us take a look at their business.”

But he added that App Annie is “very careful. We’ve already acquired three companies in two years; we want to make sure of an extremely good match [before buying a fourth company].”

Schmitt also suggested not reading too much into the move, including plans for an IPO. “We’re definitely not looking at going public in 2016, and we were never looking at that,” he said.